Whatcha Been Watching?

[arry_g]

Went to see Guardians of the Galaxy Friday night. Absolutely loved it! If it wasn't for the cost of babysitters I'd happily go again.

The movie was clearly designed to focus on building up "The Guardians" and goes to greater lengths to establish the personalities and quirks of Peter (Pratt), Gamora (Saldana), Rocket (Cooper), Groot (Diesel) and Drax (Bautista) than it does to villains Nebula (Gillan) and Ronan (Pace). I don't see this as a weakness of the film, I just think that Gunn and his team had to do what the Avengers did in multiple movies with just one and as a result the bad guys although threatening were less interesting than Hiddleson's Loki for example.

Now that the team is established I would expect 2017's Guardians of the Galaxy movie focus a little more on the big bad and give the heroes a chance to banter and bounce off of them a bit more.

As a fan of the comic it is fantastic to see this IP get such global attention, especially as the comic has had a lot of ups and downs!

[Todinho]

Watched a few things this week:

I second everything Arry said about Guardians of the Galaxy,really fun movie cant wait for the sequel.

Kubrick's Paths of Glory I liked it alot,it reminded me of Dr Strangelove a little bit ,what I found a bit shit was everyone speaking english on the French front! But it's not such a big deal suppose.

And lastly episodes 10&11 of Korra,Im really really liking how this season is turning out to me it has already surpassed everything else this series has produced,Zaheer is turning out to be everything I hoped for Amon and all the characters have been enjoyable to watch,which is a miracle because they made me hate Bolin & Korra on season two and now Im really liking them.
I really hope this saga extends to season 4 it would be a waste to be done with these villans in just one season but anyway really glad to see the series at full speed once again.

[Scrustle]

I've been getting this feeling in Korra that Bolin might learn lavabending, probably from the antagonist character that does it. But this series is already almost over, so I don't think it's likely that if Bolin does learn, that he'll do it this series. So that could be a plot thread that gets carried over to Book 4, which they have already planned out at least. It might already be in production too.

[dezm0nd]

Found it really hard to start a new game lately so I've been putting some time into films of an evening. Here goes!

Under the skin
The Double
Rush
Guardians of the Galaxy
Muppets Most Wanted
The Raid 2

Enjoyed all of them but despite being self aware about it being a cash-in, the muppets was a bit of a let down.

The Raid 2 was good, had me squeeling in pain during some of the fight scenes!

[Todinho]

Finnaly watched Days of Future past yesterday and wow that's a great movie the best X-men movie by far and one of the best comic book movies.Unfortunaly that left me wanting they could make a Days of Future Past series instead since there were alot o things that happened to fast in the movie but it's still great!

[Beck]

I've just added the inbetweeners 2 to the list of films I've walked out of. What a pile of shite

[Todinho]

So I just watched the Korra finnale well...let's talk about the good first then:It had some of the best animation and fight scenes the series has ever seen,the soundtrack and sound design were great and I liked most of the characters by the end of the season instead of hating them.

The following is a spoiler filled text talking about how the story took a nose dive and questioning if they went to the LOST school of how to makes an ending:

Spoiler: show

Remember that pai sho match of Bolin and Asami in the episode the Red Lotus is revealed ?Remember how we thought it was symbolic to season's conflict and how Korra would need to understand her opponent to defeat him?NOPE! It all comes down to big dumb fist fight with she once again understanding nothing! You know the reason I was so excited by the middle of the season was because I thought they were making a season 1 retake both Amon and Zaheer have challenging political ideals and despite their methods they have a point in criticizing the society in the avatar world,when you have a villain such as this more than beat him in a fist fight has to win with ideas as well take the Dark Knight for example Batman doesnt win because he beats up the Joker he wins because the people in the boat dont blown themselfs up and because Batman is willing to shoulder the burden of being hunted so that Gotham can have a hero in Harvey Dent that's why he wins.

In seasons 1&3 of Korra though you have these Villains with challeging ideas but in the end they dont do anything with them,it ends in a fist fight and their ideals are never questioned by Korra or the main cast because in the end they are just evil so we beat them up.So these seasons just come out as blunt anti-anarchist and anti-equalist which is fine if that's what you wanna do but they seem to want to make a story that makes you question society and all that but it doesnt work if in the you turn and say "No nope the status quo is good those guys were crazy so we beat them up,now we dont ever need to talk about this again"
Im not even get into stuff like then new Red Lotus henchmen or whatever,the fact that Zuko served no purpose and the list goes on,to me it seemed they trewn alot at the wall to see what stuck and didnt give much thought and it shows in this finale,one other thing I have no problem with shows taking darker turns and all but in this finale they really went overboard with it and it was just to end the the season with no loose ends.

If I have a good thing to say is that at least this turned a little better than the season 1 finale(I swear I was waiting for the moment that Korra would get up from the wheelchair) and Bolin lavabended that one time and that was cool for 3 seconds,you know what the worse thing is after season 1 I was furious,after season 2 I was apathetic and now after season 3 im just sad I cant understand how the same people who wrote TLA wrote these 3 seasons.

[DomsBeard]

Watches Guardians Of The Galaxy the other night and absolutely loved it!. The characters, soundtrack everything really.

The mix tape is currently 99p on Google play too:

https://t.co/qc9PBro0er

[OneWingedSeahawk]

I am slightly more in the middle in regards to Guardians of the Galaxy (superheroes just aren't my genre) but 'Cherry Bomb' ringing out around the cinema was one of the best moments i've had in a theatre.

Kubrick's Paths of Glory I liked it alot,it reminded me of Dr Strangelove a little bit ,what I found a bit shit was everyone speaking english on the French front! But it's not such a big deal suppose.

Paths of Glory may just be my favourite Kubrick film, there's something about his older stuff - they were more simple but felt more human somehow.

--

For me right now i'm mostly trying to catch up with mubi which pretty much pays for my PS3 by itself. It's like a never ending treadmill though, as it's 30 films that last for a month so it adds and removes one each day. It's mostly foreign language, older films and arthouse stuff and the quality for the most part is really consistent. Basically it's the sort of place where you can watch a film called 'City of Pirates' which contains no pirates or frankly, cities but instead a women who meets a child who killed his family, who she gets engaged to but is also sort of her current fiance who they kill and possibly the man with multiple personalities of his whole family whom she marries the daughter persona. It also contains a scene where she gets food from her trunk that is mostly cabbage, raddishes, chicken legs and this guy's head which emits a red light when read poetry too aaaand one where she starts sleep walking very briskly down the road and into the ocean (where a sleep walking male figure appears out of the water) to which her father starts cheering saying she's finally going to kill herself before she abruptly turns the other way. Oh and the policemen are cultists who worship and murder for the boy.

French films, eh?

[Scrustle]

@Todinho

I think that a lot of your problems with Book 3 are things that seem like they're going to be dealt with in the next series. I got the feeling that they intentionally set up a lot of stuff that would have lasting consequences, and left some plot points unresolved, because Book 3 and 4 were always intended to be two parts of a whole story. Of course we'll just have to wait and see if that does turn out to be the case, but I did get the distinct feeling from how Book 3 has gone that this stuff isn't over, and they're not just trying to forget all about it. It ended on a note of the characters acknowledging that they still had problems, and the Red Lotus hasn't really been eradicated.

[Todinho]

Paths of Glory may just be my favourite Kubrick film, there's something about his older stuff - they were more simple but felt more human somehow.

Yep I totally agree,there's something much more human in these old movies than his latter work,dont get me wrong his other movies are still great but they feel almost lifeless in comparison I dont get the same heart that was in Dr Strangelove in say the shinning,both great movies but strangelove just has much more soul IMO.

@Scrustle
I get what you're saying but to be honest I dont really have much hope for season 4 like the end of season 2 that promised big changes and did nothing other than receive a little mention in the first episode I think the end of season 3 will have the same effect,I'd love to be wrong though.

-
Started rewatching Community this weekend,man I had forgoten how great this show is probably the best of it's kind.

[Todinho]

Watched an Italian movie by the name of La Pelle(the Skin) the movies takes place during the american ocupation of Italy in WW2 and the affect it had on the civillian population focusing on the city of Capri,it's a really grim movie and it doesnt pull any punches in showing how society can break under extreme situations and for that I liked it alot it's not a movie that anyone will be able to enjoy but it's worth a watch for those with the stomach and the interest for these things.

The funny thing is I felt really sad after watching not because of the movie itself but because probably there never will be a videogame like this movie,any game that tried to show a fraction of what this movie does would get slapped with 50 Kotaku articles saying how imoral,gratuitous and toxic it is,the closest game probably would be Spec Ops The Line and Metro but even then it's not very close but I guess I can hope for Valiant Hearts and MGSV to maybe raise up the bar in this regard.

[Scrustle]

Finally got around to the last series of Initial D. The last series is only 4 episodes, instead of the usual 26 or whatever it is. But what they did was stretch out a single race over those entire four episodes. The show has always weighed heavily on the suspension of disbelief with how long races are, but I always let it slide mostly. You can use the excuse that even though races seem to go on for much longer than they should, you're watching multiple different conversations or events going on. Perhaps they all happen simultaneously, but they just show them sequentially, for obvious reasons. Also, a lot of the stuff is internal monologue, so you could argue that those thought are far more instantaneous in a character's head than they are when actually spoken to the audience. And there's an excuse of artistic license on top of all of that too. But this last race stretches out what shouldn't take much more than 5 minutes at most in reality to almost 80 minutes.

But they actually managed to make the race pretty entertaining. There were a lot of exciting and unexpected moments, and for a lot of it I genuinely was unsure of who would actually win. It was quite interesting to see how they mostly focused on Takumi's opponent too (Takumi being the protagonist of the show for those who aren't aware). It highlighted an interesting role reversal. His opponent was much like how Takumi used to be at the start of the show. A young, inexperienced, prodigal driver who often used unorthodox techniques, and was initially resistant to the idea of racing in the first place. Really showed how Takumi grew from that in to being the more experienced and skilled driver that he became, although he was still given a run for his money. Just like how Takumi could take on much more experienced racers when he was still a beginner.

The ending sequence was cool too, although it wasn't really because it was anything particularly special. Wrapped up everyone's plot threads and showed what they all went on to do, which was nice, but also had a few pseudo-cameos of stuff from the kind of real world car culture that inspired the show. So it was basically a montage of stuff where I could go "I know what that is!", as well as the character stuff too of course.

[OneWingedSeahawk]

Finally started Deadwood seeing I have a Prime free trail and my DVD of S1 is missing the second disc. Not to point out the obvious, but it's -really- good.

Yep I totally agree,there's something much more human in these old movies than his latter work,dont get me wrong his other movies are still great but they feel almost lifeless in comparison I dont get the same heart that was in Dr Strangelove in say the shinning,both great movies but strangelove just has much more soul IMO.

A lot of the latter ones seem more focused on symbolism and the technological side of film making and so rather sacrificed story/characters for the sake of it. It's like Barry Lyndon, there's so much going on there but I just don't like it very much, there's nothing really to latch on to. And less said about Eyes Wide Shut the better.

[Todinho]

Tell me about it I had a philosophy professor that loved that movie and wouldnt shut up about it so much that I have a irrational hatred for that film until today.

[KissMammal]

I recently caught Snowpiercer, which was immensely disappointing.

I was expecting a gritty, action-packed slice of sci fi with a bit of substance - something along the lines of District 9 or Children of Men, but it's basically an out and out art movie, with a deeply eccentric tone that veers all over the place. I find that it's entirely possible to buy into an absurd or implausible premise in a movie (in this case 'the remainder of humanity all living on a train that perpetually circumnavigates a frozen Earth') so long as you treat it seriously and establish real human stakes, but Snowpiercer really failed to engage on all counts.

Ultimately for me it was too cheap-looking to provide spectacle, too stylised and preposterous to be good sci fi and too obvious to be thought-provoking social commentary. It had a couple of vaguely interesting ideas, but certainly not enough to sustain a two-hour running time. Perhaps it would have made a better short film?

Genuinely baffled by the across the board enthusiastic reviews it got, and can't help but suspect critics are giving it a bit of an easy ride as it's a foreign production. Personally I found the dialogue and scripting every bit as awkward and clunky as anything you'd get in a typical 'dumb' blockbuster. Definitely a 'love it or hate it' kind of film.

[Todinho]

Watched Die Welle(aka The Wave) today a german movie based on a book based on a experiment about how Fascism can rise even in democratic societies ,and for that the movie is pretty good it goes a bit over the top at times but it gets the job done definetly worth a watch for those interested on the subject.

[kappisun]

Watched winter soldier. I'm not really a fan of cap America but really enjoyed this. Really liked the 70's Cold War thriller feel to it not seen guardians but thu prob my favourite marvel film so far (which was a surprise)

[LaikaMuttnik]

Thoroughly enjoyed FRANK!
It's a shame the trailer looks like just a quirky comedy - although it is indeed very quirky and funny, it's also so charming and gets deeply moving, it's the best film I saw this year.
I also liked Michael Fassbender's lovely voice, which reminded me of my favourite artist Neil Hannon aka The Divine Comedy
And you may empathise more, especially right at the start, if you're a musician and have tried to write a song (but failed miserably)

[Bakers_12]

I really enjoyed the companion book to Frank and really want to see it. Each time I go to watch it something mucks up my plans